Fun with MA COVID-19 Reporting 28-Dec-2020 Edition

Today I'm taking another look at the recent clusters.  I provide the tiers in detail below, but here's what I see in the numbers and easily distinguished tiers:

Childcare is by far the biggest spreader. Social Gatherings indeed continue to be among the next group as do Restaurants & Food Courts and Industrial Settings. K-12 Schools were just below that. Hospitals are dangerous but they're always dangerous, because that's where you find a concentration of sick people. The state has decided to continue to blame everything on social gatherings and pay lip service to doing something by reducing capacity at restaurants and retail ... but by not shutting things down, childcare is a necessity to continue businesses being open and we still will see cases pile up from the top 3 tiers of case creators and top 2 tiers of cluster creators. You know, it's almost like the Governor doesn't actually care to try to drive down the numbers the way we did back in April/May.

In the last month, if we sort by number of cases and ignore residential-based settings

  1. Tier 1 - Childcare: 523 cases from 288 clusters
  2. Tier 2 (in the high 200's/low 300's)
    1. Hospitals: 346 cases from 46 clusters
    2. Social Gatherings: 322 cases from 89 clusters
    3. Industrial Settings: 282 cases from 82 clusters
    4. Restaurants & Food Courts: 267 cases from 80 clusters
  3. Tier 3 - K-12 schools: 211 cases from 91 clusters
  4. Tier 4 (nickname: The Others)
    1. Other Workplaces: 153 cases from 48 clusters
    2. Other Healthcare: 137 cases from 45 clusters
  5. Tier 5 maxes out at 76 cases from 40 clusters at Colleges & Universities and also includes Retail & Services, Organized Athletics/Camps, Places of Worship, other Food Establishments, Recreation/Cultural, Office, and Other
Another way to look at these is in order by clusters:
  1. Tier 1 - Childcare 288 clusters producing 523 cases (shocking that this would top both lists, right?)
  2. Tier 2 (80s and 91)
    1. K-12 Schools: 91 clusters producing 211 cases
    2. Social Gatherings: 89 clusters producing 322 cases
    3. Industrial Settings: 82 clusters producing 282 cases
    4. Restaurants & Food Courts: 80 clusters producing 267 cases
  3. Tier 3 (40s)
    1. Other Workplaces: 48 clusters producing 153 cases
    2. Hospitals: 46 clusters producing 346 cases
    3. Other Healthcare: 45 clusters producing 137 cases
    4. Colleges & Universities: 40 clusters producing 74 cases
  4. Tier 4 (30s)
    1. Retail & Services: 37 clusters producing 69 cases
    2. Organized Athletics/Camps: 34 clusters producing 64 cases
  5. Tier 5 maxes out at 21 clusters producing 62 cases at Places of Worship and also includes Other Food Establishments, Offices, Recreation/Cultural, and Other
Oh, and in case you're wondering how we're doing with cases and deaths, the week of Dec 6 continues to see a steady increase in reported cases and is inching closer and closer to reaching the record set by the week of Nov 29. The week of Dec 13 is further behind but it also has longer to go before it steadies out. The week of Dec 6 found 26 new cases between Saturday and today while the week of Dec 13 found 135. Even if we don't consider that these weeks are going to continue to come in, we still have more than twice the number of cases for the week of Dec 13 as we did at the peak in April, so, you know, not great. Oh, and last Monday, with plenty of time to continue to increase, is now the highest single day on record by over 100 cases (6,378 vs the previous Monday which reached 6,252).

Deaths continue to mount with the week of Dec 13 averaging 53 deaths per day and last week looks to be exceeding that. Just as a friendly reminder that we were only seeing averages in the teens from the end of June through the end of October. Deaths for a given day climb dramatically for significantly less time than cases do and stabilize within about 5 days, so we'll know around Thursday this week what last week's deaths per day average really was, within reason.

Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MA Wastewater Tracking (23-Jan-2024 data)

Image
See that little uptick at the end of each graph? This didn't happen in 2022 but did in 2023. We understood the goal in 2022 (to some degree) but since ... is there some portion of the population who says "covid spread must be down so let's go nuts"? I suspect this is partially colleges reconvening their students on campuses where in 2022 they were still trying to get their students to maintain some precautions and they haven't been since... but I also don't think this is just college campuses.
Read more

Fun with MA COVID-19 Reporting 02-Nov-2020 Edition - NEW LAYOUT IN THE REPORT!

THERE'S A NEW REPORT LAYOUT! (there will be a separate post about current counts/prediction follow up) It's always interesting to see a new layout because it gives insight into what the state's priorities and story-telling is.  Today's layout shows that they continue to be either sloppy with their design OR they want to try to confuse people by putting deaths and turn-around time for test results under the same heading line, similar to how all testing/cases are under one and how all information on hospitalizations are under a second line. We now have an "average age of deaths"... but we don't have which average it is, whether it's mean, median, mode, or whether it's overall or for the newly reported or the last 7 days or last 14 days or any kind of detail around it.... same with the new "average age of cases that were hospitalized". They're no longer showing the percent of individuals tested testing positive and only showing the perce...
Read more

Switching to Wastewater Monitoring Only

Case counts were already somewhat misleading so, if people were actually paying attention to the wastewater and had a target and/or threshold for concern, that would actually be potentially a more reasonable thing to monitor... with that in mind, let's look at some time points to try to find some measures to consider.  Let's start with establishing a few thresholds.   Early on in the pandemic, we said 8 cases per 100,000 people per day was the highest threshold of concern (ie, that was the introduction to the highest risk-rating we had).  Later, we relaxed this a bit because we realized that this would keep us on high alert and never allow us to go back to normal ... sort of like saying that everybody is smoking so the threshold that for risking cancer shouldn't be smoking 3 cigarettes a day but instead should be a pack a day.  Based on this relaxing of concern, let's go ahead and add in 16 cases per 100,000 people per day as a threshold to monitor for, just as ...
Read more